Our product - a mining game designed to use rubies as virtual currency to vote for questions that we'd like to ask the instructor. Since it's a video game, we created the below theme to fit a "digging gems inside a cave" kind of scenario.

We began working on the project starting Saturday, but we did not foresee the massive amount of work it would take to implement the backend logic as well as the frontend designs. On Sunday, I went home at 6am, but luckily the project was largely completed by then.

The highlight was definitely being able to build a fantasy game styled theme. I had always wanted to build games when I was a kid, and finally having the chance and skills to do so is very rewarding. As our previous projects involved mostly Bootstrap and very little CSS work, this project challenged us to learn more about HTML/CSS. We added images to different behaviors (hover, active, etc.) and also sound effects for digging and finding treasure.

One key learning from this Hackathon was team collaboration using Github. Our previous projects only involved forking from an original git and pull revised versions compared with the same original git. However, as now there are two people collaborating, and both working on the entire project at the same time, there will be conflicts when creating pull requests. Merging turned out to be rather complex when there are too many files that had been changed by both teammates. The low point of the project was at 5 in the morning, when I accidentally thought using "git rm" would remove the duplicate files and allow for merger to complete. I did this to about 10 files, after which I realized I couldn't even get any page to open anymore. I began to freak out and frantically started Googling. I then found an incredible solution:

git reset --hard master@{"20 minutes ago"}

This command saved my life. The entire local git returned to its prestine state 20min ago and I was able to make edits manually on top of the origin file. This was more tedious of course, butit beats crashing the whole site.

At the end of the presentations, our team came out tied for first place in the Hackathon. That was pretty awesome. We're due for a fancy dinner with Xdite Wednesday at China Grill. Wasn't expecting this when I signed up for the class so... pretty stoked!